


Ringing

by kormantic



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Buddy comedy, M/M, adventcha!, if that helps, it's not really dubious as much as it's inadvertent, maybe it's sex pollen, maybe it's wraith telepathy, pomo berries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:20:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29105487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kormantic/pseuds/kormantic
Summary: He’d have thought that glossy botox face of Todd’s would be smooth and hard as plastic, but in fact, Todd’s skin was powder soft, and, somehow more surprisingly, fever warm.  He lifted Todd’s chin and fitted the bone-plate mask over his white face.“Okay, buddy. Show time.” He adjusted the mask judiciously before tapping it with his forefinger. “Don’t fuck this up.”
Relationships: John Sheppard/Todd the Wraith
Comments: 12
Kudos: 30
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2020





	Ringing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rudigersmooch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rudigersmooch/gifts).



He’d have thought that glossy botox face of Todd’s would be smooth and hard as plastic, but in fact, Todd’s skin was powder soft, and, somehow more surprisingly, fever warm. He lifted Todd’s chin and fitted the bone-plate mask over his white face.

“Okay, buddy. Show time.” He adjusted the mask judiciously before tapping it with his forefinger. “Don’t fuck this up.”

Todd just gave him one of his weirdly relaxed, breathy laughs. Like the guy always had time to be amused at the world. Even when it was actively trying to kill him.

Which, to be fair, John thought, was a lot. Also, the two of them were high as _shit_.

*

Maybe he’d lost count of just how many times he’d been snacked on by Wraith. Rodney would know. He kept a journal somewhere, and John was convinced Rodney knew to the follicle how many gray hairs John had on a regular day.

He kind of hopes this place is another time dilation thing, where he ages and the other folks back at the ranch only miss a few minutes while he’s gone, instead of a memory wipe. The water in the fountain thing (installed by the Wraith? The jetski guys? He wasn’t sure.) in the little free-range human flat-roofed rustic cabin they set up for him is fresh and sweet and plentiful. It’s aerated or something, so it looks like a spring bubbling up to just ruffle the water, juggle his face around. The basin is dark enough to see that his eyes are still the same color, if his beard is not.

So he’d apparently been here long enough to grow a pretty serious beard, then. Maybe he’d been in stasis or something. The timeline was a little blurry, so sue him.

He knows that when (if) Rodney shows up, it’s the first thing he’ll give John shit for. Partly because Rodney is incapable of really growing one of his own, and partly because he’s embarrassed about how much he’s into John in a beard. He’d gone so far as to actually admit it once, when he was sex drunk and high from a 32 hour stretch of frantic sleeplessness, still panting from the way John had made him come.

To be fair, John had been going gray before the jumper got slurped into the weird pink haze surrounding whatever planet he’d been flying past after dodging through a handy activated gate while pursued by… well some damn gang of aliens, human traffickers apparently, who had insultingly sexy sleek back hover jets. But it’s been a while now, and he’s feeling pretty old these days.

There’s a certain cowboy appeal to the loneliness here. Vast grasslands edged with trees so big it’s like seeing a natural Chrysler building sprouting right out of the ground. A little herd of animals that grazed all day before climbing into the trees at night: pastel pink and blue-ish woolly coats, fangs, long arms, prehensile tails… John calls them “sloth sheep” - or ‘sleep’ for short. The Wraith, when they come, leave him human food - vegetables and some kind of jerky he’s a little afraid to think about too hard. He’d started setting snares and he ate whatever he caught, usually things that looked like what would happen if a snake and a hamster had a baby. He’d worried it would agitate the sleep, but the herd remained both incurious and unafraid. He had gotten bored enough to experiment with fermenting some of the fat yellow berries everywhere and had a vague plan to… sedate the sleep? So he could hack off some wool? And maybe learn to weave or some goddamn thing. He had no idea if this planet, if the continent he was on, had seasons at all, or if it was this mild summer all the time. If it did get cold here, he’d probably have to hunt and skin a few of them. At least he knew how to cure a hide, thanks to Teyla’s patient teaching. She’d only sighed two or three times during the whole exercise, which had taken four weeks and several trips to the mainland to check his progress. Maybe he could felt it. And if the fermenting didn’t work on the sleep, it would probably still be a perfectly drinkable fruit wine. He could get behind a little sangria at this point.

He caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye, and did his best not to turn his head and gawk. He casually stretched one leg over the other, sitting by his low cookfire and admiring the hypnotic ripple in the field before him. It was pretty windy here on Pink Haze, pretty much all the time. It was a good thing his hair thrived under those kinds of conditions.

He saw something move again, but it was nothing he felt his lizard brain tense up about. The aliens who had staked him out here like a goat never came around, and the Wraith came through the stargate, with its empty plinth, sans DHD. Just some animal minding its own business, probably, like the sleep. Only they moved slow as honey dripping off a spoon, and the little ones clung to their mama’s backs like velcro. He could totally David Attenborough a whole episode about these guys. He was definitely Earth’s foremost authority on sleep. Rodney had little respect for medical science, but he liked to keep informed about animal behavior, and after his encounter with Lassie, John had been induced to sit through more than one documentary on the majestic Blue Whale.

Most nights he just slept out on the roof, staring up at the unfamiliar stars, gleaming in a velvety purple night sky. It was a little like living on the cover of a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper, but at least it was peaceful. He’d had enough excitement in his time to still value a little boredom now and then, but it had been days now without any video games or music other than what he’d hum to himself when he just needed to hear the sound of something indelibly human.

He’d need to see about making jerky from the hamsnakes, in case the Wraith got forgetful or decided to deliberately starve him out. They never questioned him, and they only took a sip at a time really, but they also didn’t bother to explain their nefarious plans. He was a little worried that there wasn’t enough fat in his diet to keep him from getting protein poisoning, but he’d been supplementing with berries and grain, the thick orange tassels that topped the sweeping grasses, and he’d been occupying some of his ample free time by threshing it and drying it on a flat rock for storage, in expectation of a winter that might or might not ever come.

The flicker happened again, and this time he tilted his head to look at it more directly. It looked like a Wraith. But more than that, it... it looked like. Todd.

Well hell. Maybe the grain had molded?

“Looks like I’ve hit the ‘hallucination’ stage of my solitary confinement. Huh.” 

Todd staggered a little as he got closer. He looked half-starved and a little greener on the scale of seafoam to fish-belly white.

“I assure you John Sheppard, I am real enough. Atlantis... has sent me to rescue you.” And then he collapsed at John’s feet, eyes rolling back in his head.

John prodded him gently with the toe of his boot, just making sure he was really there, before squatting on his heels beside the unconscious Wraith.

“My hero,” John muttered.

*

He dragged Todd into his cabin and heaved him onto the cot. Then he dipped his shirt sleeve in the fountain and kind of dribbled it on Todd’s face. The guy roused a little, then blinked, hissing like a wet cat.

“You passed out,” John said by way of explanation.

“It has been many days since I last fed.”

“Seems to me that I’ve heard that before. You get the munchies and then I have to bail you out, recharge your batteries. That sound about right?”

“That is not an incorrect summation. On another day, it might even have been enough to get us out of the kleesting pod.”

“Kleesting pod. That’s what they call this little B and B? Sunny fields and force fields that bounce you back if you walk too far?”

“It is a ritual that…” Todd wheezed a little. “If we live, John Sheppard, I will describe it in detail for your anthropologists.”

“Looking forward to that. In the meantime, got any intel on our current situation?”

“I was ‘made’, as your Major Lorne might say. As you have seen in the past, I was able to act as an intermediary with a third hive, to meet with those holding you in a diplomatic capacity. One of them knew me by sight, and I was forced to flee. The dart I have stolen is on the other side of the field, but it was damaged in the landing. And unfortunately… Once I entered the kleesting pod…”

“So this is a Hotel California thing?”

“I am unfamiliar with that phrase.”

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. One way glass, right?”

“I believe so, if I get your meaning.”

John rubbed his throat, nettled.

“Well, do you know when we can expect our guests again? I can’t seem to keep track of when they come and go.”

“It is unclear, but I would not expect them for several days.”

“Think you can hold out ‘til then? Maybe we can jump ‘em and you can, you know, do the hand thing, get a boost, help us fight our way out of here.”

“I can endure, John Sheppard. This is not the worst privation I have had.”

“Yeah yeah, Geneva Convention, war crimes, blah blah blah. Are we going to be able to pull this off?”

Todd closed his eyes and smiled briefly.

“That remains to be seen.”

*

Todd drifts for a while, refuses the water John offers, seems to fall into a fitful sleep.

It’s been a long time, for whatever value that phrase can hold for someone who’s either been frozen in time and/or Mementoed, and Todd is basically a person. Kind of. So when Todd comes to the next morning, John finds himself feeling chatty. He spends some time describing the innate superiority of Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” over the original, and how he didn’t really care for _Walk the Line_ as a film, although of course he could appreciate Reese Witherspoon’s Oscar-winning turn as June. “You know she sang her own parts? That woman has chops.”

Todd didn’t seem disinterested necessarily, but he also didn’t voice any opinions on the virtues of an Academy Award for June Carter Cash as opposed to the one she was robbed of as Elle Woods.

“Yeah, okay. I know we haven’t seen a lot of the same movies.” John, sitting on the floor beside Todd’s cot, tilted his head. “Do you guys even have that kind of stuff? Movies? Trash TV? Plays, that sort of thing?”

“We… sing, would be closest to your understanding. It is… togetherness, cohesion. It is a bright, strong feeling.”

The idea that the Wraith could experience… _feelings_ should be less surprising than Todd thinking things were funny, but somehow it’s not.

“So. What’s the deal with the boneheads?”

Hilariously, Todd just tips him a sassy eyebrow.

“Boneheads - the guys in the masks, the drones or whatever. How come they have masks, anyway? Are they like, born with them? Do they… talk? Are they just your heavies, or do they make ship repairs and stuff like that?”

“They are not born, as the (and here he made some sound John couldn’t even ascribe any letters to)... as we are. They are drones, as you say. Manufactured. ‘Cloned’. They do not speak, but they do not need to, as they are Hive. They wear the masks when they are deployed, as they are used to darkness, or working in only the glow of bioluminescence. Bright light disorients them, makes them… feral, is I think the word.”

“Berserkers. Great.”

“In days past, we had tried to calm them with drugs, but it clouded the connection with the Hive. We could no longer tell them apart to direct them properly, and they would not heed orders. So now we simply keep them masked whenever they are to be away from the Hive.”

John munched on a stalk of orange grass meditatively.

“You know, the Wraith, when they show up, bring one of you high-beam types and a pair of drones.”

“That is standard,” Todd said with a tip of his chin.

“So. I think I have an idea about how to get out of here.”

After a pause Todd lifted his head.

“Will you be sharing this idea, or shall I simply feel your thoughts as I feed upon you in order to prepare?”

“Ha ha ha. We’re gonna dope the horses and pull a ringer.”

That earned him _two_ sassy eyebrows.

*

His mother only ever smoked _or_ drank. “One or the other, BabyJohn. That’s _discipline_ ,” she’d wink before taking a languid draw from her resinous home-rolled jay, her hazy sighing exhale spiced like incense. “The guy I go to, Hector, is a fucking artisan. He’s an honest to Christ genius. When you’re eighteen, maybe, I’ll give you his number.” She only swore when she smoked, and she only smoked alone. Or with John, sometimes, if it was late and his dad was traveling.

She’d been a horse girl as a kid, she told him. “Crazy for ‘em. But your grandad was a cab driver, and that’s not the kind of money that gets you riding lessons.”

It had honestly never occurred to John to ask how she’d met his father, but he wasn’t averse to knowing, and that night, on their vast front porch, David obediently asleep in bed, humid breeze bringing the taste of dung and hay dust and jasmine, she told him.

“So as soon as I could swing it, I got a job mucking out stalls and walking the horses at the country club that had a stable a few towns over. I biked, like, an hour each way. For the privilege of shoveling shit.” She chuckled a little. “And I loved it. The horses were these giant idiot weirdos, horses are so _weird_ John, they are ridiculous, you know? Of course you know. You ride Butch all over those fields. But I love them. And they love me,” she smiled.

They did. Butch was aloof for a horse, and he gave most people the side-eye. John didn’t really mind about being the only one to touch him, because he felt less dickish about being in the barn if Stevie and Clem didn’t have to fetch and carry for him. But Butch would strain to lip at his mother’s hair if she was at the paddock. She’d never even had to bribe him with sugar.

“Anyway, I grew up there in that barn, really. Boys started looking at me, and so far they haven’t stopped.” She paused a little, pensive. “And one summer, Patrick stabled Fleet there. You remember Fleet, sugar? He was a blood bay, red as a penny back then. You only knew Fleet Auxiliary when he was an old man, and getting gray.

“I actually met your dad at the pool. I’d wheedled my way into pool privileges when I wasn’t working, and he saw me in the water and asked me to have a drink with him. Patrick. Patrick Sheppard.” She took another hit and was quiet for some little while. The breeze soughed through the flowering vines she’d coaxed around the columns of the porch, and she touched one of the curling leaves before continuing.

“So I did. And I just never said anything about where I worked, and it’s not like he asked me about it. If I'd just been a pretty bikini at a country club pool in the middle of the week, I wouldn't have had a job in any case. He was nice. A little stiff, maybe. You know what a WASP is, baby boy?”

“It’s like a bee?”

“Well, yes and no. It means he’s a thoroughbred. Like Fleet. He was interning at the capitol that summer. He had a red car and a red horse and a trust fund. He had pretty eyes and nice teeth. His family owned this--” she waved at the rolling hills and the stable and the house, all money and windows and painstakingly maintained lawns. “And he liked me. So I made sure he’d keep liking me.”

“How’d you do that?” Looking back from the vantage of 39 years, John figured he knew what she’d done, but he’d been 11 at the time.

“I pulled a ringer,” she grinned conspiratorially.

“So… you just asked him to marry you?”

“Noooo. Ringing is when you take two horses, one slow and one fast. The very slow one doesn’t actually need to exist, but it’s convenient if it does. You enter the slow horse in a race for slow horses, but on the day of the race, run the fast one instead. No one but you knows that the slow horse is really the fast one, so the horse goes off at long odds, and when he wins, you clean up.

“Horse girls are very thorough, Johnny. I saw _National Velvet_ four times, I read racing forms, I read the encyclopedia, I read _so many_ horse books, and one of those books had an interview with Pete Barrie. If you wanted to win at the track, he could help you do it. He once said he knew just how much heroin to shoot into a horse’s neck to make him think he was Pegasus. And he knew how to buy fast horses and pass them off as slow ones. He’d bleach the horses, then dye them again, paint a blaze or dapple a hide, pluck their manes just so. Their own jockeys would swear that they were riding the same horse.

“I went blonde that summer. Asked my sister to do my hair. Read a lot of magazines. I dressed this fast horse as a slow one. Instead of heaving around like a half-broke mustang, I paced myself, kept my head up, spirit enough to catch the eye, but easy manners, and a soft mouth.” She snorted a little, and nudged John with her elbow. “Long odds,” she said, taking another hit. “But when you win, you clean up.” 

“Davy now, he’s a thoroughbred, too. Has the lines and the gait. Wants to be like his dad. You, though.” She tugged his cowlick. “You’re a mustang like me, half-wild. A fast horse in a slow race. Up to you if you wanna run as a ringer or not.”

*

“...so we muddy up the connection and then they don’t recognize us and then we just walk right back onto the ship. Hide in plain sight, find a live stargate, leave. It’s a cakewalk.”

“Let us review. You propose that I ambush and overpower three of my brethren.”

“Well, I’ll _help_ ,” John snapped.

“Then, disguised as drones, we return to the ship without our First, with the misguided hope that they will not recognize us, despite the fact that we are a Hivemind and that you are a human, as well as quite skinny and pale.”

John bared his teeth in a hard smile.

“Back atcha, buddy. Yes. First of all, nobody ever looks at the henchmen, and second of all, they won’t be able to read us, because before that, we’re gonna get really, _really_ drunk.”

“Ah. It all becomes clear,” Todd said dryly. “There is also the small matter of the self-destruct mechanism each drone carries.”

“Can’t you just disable it?”

“It has a _ten second delay_ ,” Todd said with some exasperation.

“Yeah, so? You can teach me how and I’ll do the other guy at the same time.”

“I will, I remind you, be overpowering _three_ other Wraith.

“Actually, I had an idea about that, too.”

*

Teyla was going to be stoked about how useful John had been finding all her crafting classes. He’d learned to plait long grasses to make waterproof baskets, and that skill had translated handily into setting snares outside his hut that were strong enough to lift three wraith off their feet.

It was the matter of a few seconds to disarm the drones (both of their weapons and their timebombs), and extremely easy (and medium satisfying) to blast the First who’d have had John as an aperitif right in the face.

John averted his eyes while Todd fed, and when Todd tossed him one of the drone helmets, his posture was ramrod straight and his now-white skin had a fresh, pearly gleam to it.

“Okay. Suit up and let’s get shitfaced.”

*

“This will not work,” Todd had intoned.

“What if I get drunk first and then you feed on me?”

It hadn’t been John’s favorite idea, but he would have been game if it had been the only way to make his admittedly shaky plan work.

“The intoxication you hope to achieve cannot come from this preparation.”

“Hey, I’ve been fermenting them for a while now. They smell... _Kind_ of alcoholic. We’ll just--”

“I understand your aim,” Todd had interrupted. “The pomo berry does not ferment, it only rots.”

“Then I guess we’ll just have to fake it, then,” John said with a shrug that had done nothing to convey a carefree can-do attitude.

“Or we can ingest it properly, using the time honored ritual of the kleesting pod.”

“I thought you were going to wait until we got out of here alive before you bothered to explain that whole thing,” John had pointed out snidely.

“Your innovative plan has inspired a certain… let us call it ‘optimism’.” 

“I think you probably mean a certain ‘fatalistic ennui’, but I like your term better.”

*

In the end, they just needed some pomo berries, fifteen minutes and his cookfire.

“When they are about to crumble,” Todd said, “you remove them from the flames and crush them, applying the ash like so,” and he bared his teeth and rubbed the resulting neon magenta dust on his thumb against his gumline.

“So a kleesting pod is just… the Wraith equivalent of your parent’s basement? You just come out here to get high?”

Todd’s breathy laugh see-sawed on for some time. With an honest-to-fuck twinkle in his eye he said, “Not at all. It is for ritual combat for the right to breed.”

“Uh. Come again?”

Another chuckle rattled like a cough in Todd’s throat and he grinned at John.

“Various candidates come to feed on tribute--”

“That would be me,” John pointed out.

“Yes,” Todd agreed. “Over the course of a cycle. How they arrange to come is in part barter and negotiation and in part random chance.”

“Do they draw straws or something?”

“I believe your Dr. McKay would liken it most to ‘spin the bottle’,” Todd said.

“Riiiiight.”

“The candidate who is the last to feed upon you--”

“You mean the one who takes the last bite,” John bitched.

“--triggers the Kleest. That Wraith, having fed most recently, will have the advantage, as all courting Firsts will immediately convene and fight for the right to mate with a queen and father an heir.”

“Can more than one of them win? Is it like… the Wraith Olympics? A series of, like, physical trials?”

“Oh no. They will arrive, ingest the pomo berries as I have done, and then, when the light of the next dawn arrives, they will kill one another, feasting upon each other’s life force until the last one standing is as a god in power.”

John froze for a long moment. His Wraith armor smelled like the alley behind a fish house and the too-long plates on his shoulders were digging into his bent forearms as he hunched by the fire, heart banging in his chest.

“Maybe this is something you should have told me _before_ you snorted all that coke,” John hissed.

Todd grinned again, his eyes soft.

“The pomo berries make it very difficult to… to wish to harm another. The effect is quite…”

“If you say it’s an aphrodisiac I swear to God I am going to punch you in the _dick_ ,” John promised darkly.

Todd laughed again.

“It does not engender a sexual response, John Sheppard. It fosters a sense of… brotherhood. There have been many cases where no fatalities occur at all, and no males breed that season.”

After a moment of consideration, John said, “That… doesn’t make a goddamned lick of sense.” 

Todd only shrugged and offered John a handful of charred berries.

“It is a ritual. Archaic. Perhaps foolish. Are not many of your religions so?”

“Fair point,” John allowed. He plucked a berry from Todd’s palm and poked it cautiously with his forefinger. It shivered into ash in his hand; it was still warm.

“Shitfaced,” Todd said with an encouraging dip of his chin.

Gamely, John dragged his finger along his own gumline.

It was like getting punched in the face by a cloud of sunshine. Everything immediately took on a liminal glow and his blood felt like sweet taffy in his veins. It was weird as all hell. But not even remotely unpleasant.

John rubbed the minty patch on his gums with his tongue; the ash tasted the way gasoline smelled. He remembered enough to drop his bonemask down to cover his face before helping Todd do the same.

“Okay, buddy. Show time.” He adjusted the mask judiciously before tapping it with his forefinger. “Don’t fuck this up.”

Todd laughed as he got to his feet, and it seemed to take forever, jesus that guy was _tall,_ John thought admiringly. From his towering height, he offered John a hand up, and John obligingly took it. It was friendly. Nice. They were bros now, and it was pretty fucking awesome.

They held hands all the way back to the Wraith shuttle.

*

Once onboard, John just tried to keep one step behind Todd. Like every time he’d been on a Wraith ship, it was dim and cold and bumpy. One of the Firsts appeared in a swirl of flat-ironed hair and a very glittery coat to make a lot of noises at them. John was so fucked up that he could only hear the trombone wah-wah that adults made in Peanuts cartoons. It felt vaguely like being yelled at by your dad. Why were these guys all trying to harsh his buzz?

Nobody sent them back out to look for their missing captain guy, they just gestured down a corridor in a way that said they weren’t angry with them, just disappointed. Todd nodded a little and then led John further into the dimness, into a doorless room that was walled with grabby sticky stuff like the strands of rubber cement you had to peel off your fingers after arts and crafts at summer camp.

“We will wait here,” Todd said. “It will be time for (some other sounds that John couldn't string together.) There will be a sleep rotation for all on the ship not on the bridge. There are no patrols if there are no intruder alarms triggered, so it will be the best time to steal another ship. The one we arrived in will suit when the crew retires. By then the pomo berries should have worn off enough to allow me to manipulate any drones monitoring the bay into thinking we have an assigned mission and allow us to leave."

“Yeah, sure,” John nodded. Felt the bonemask press against his temples. It felt kinda good, like when a masseuse worked on the back of your neck. He nodded some more for good measure. “Sounds good.”

He heard Todd’s dry laugh.

“You are quite affected by the pomo berries,” he remarked.

“I’m fucking baked,” John agreed sunnily. “I hope we can’t find these growing just any old place, because Atlantis will grind to a halt if we could be this relaxed allllllll the tiiiiiiiiime.”

John regretted not thinking to take a pocketful with him. Getting Rodney high on these would have been hilarious. He bet Rodney would let him suck him for an hour if he was ashed up with pomo berries; he was usually way too keyed-up and impatient for anything but efficient blowjobs from John most nights. It was easier to tease him the next morning; Rodney was slow to wake and was more amenable to languid make outs if he’d come in recent memory.

There was a rumbling hum rising all around them; it pressed against John’s ears and cheekbones like ghostly hands, a blanketing pressure, almost warm.

“What the shit _is_ that?”

Todd had lifted his bone mask, and lifted John’s as well, leaning close to bawl in John’s ear.

“It is the (wraith something something)!”

“And what is _that_?” John felt streaky jolts of panic start to vibrate in his forearms and his throat.

“I will show you,” Todd shouted, and closed his hand around John’s bare bicep.

John rocked onto his toes, head tilting back and teeth slamming together like he’d been electrocuted. It was a wave of… _joy_ . The rocketing hum was enthralling, the entire hive communing, combining, in vibrant pulsing colors he could _taste_ , shifting behind his eyelids, a honeyed thrum beneath his skin. It wasn’t only that, John realized, it wasn’t just the singing--Todd was _feeding_ him. Lifeforce that had been stolen away over weeks (months?) in drips and drabs was now rushing into him, a river into a teacup, and he seized with it, bones too glad, muscle and sinew snapped taut as plucked guitar strings. 

He came. So hard he forgot how to breathe, so hard black splotches started crowding out the colors he could still taste, so hard he thought he was goddamned _levitating_.

Maybe pomo berries weren’t an aphrodisiac. If you were Wraith. If you were human, though… As his body slacked down, John realized distantly that he’d been hard since the fucking berry dust had turned minty-sour in his mouth. 

*

After _that_ , Todd lugging John into the about-to-be-stolen ship, lolling and sticky and boneless, and then flying them through a handy stargate was anti-climactic (ha fucking _ha_ ).

It probably qualified as the weirdest walk of shame John had ever experienced.

After he’d sobered up a little and shrugged out of the fishbowl-funk of the drone armor, he found a dark corner and shucked his pants, tugging off his underwear and shoving them under a nook in the bumpy wall before pulling on his now slightly-less-gross pants again. 

His ears were so hot they almost _hurt_ , and it was hard to keep his eyes from skidding away from Todd’s tattooed profile. He kept clearing his throat and then… not saying anything.

Todd seemed cool with companionable silence, and anyway may have been entirely unaware of what he’d done to John. John sure as hell wasn’t going to discuss it with him, either way.

They landed near the second stargate they’d flown through so that John could gate home. Scuffing a hand through the hair on the back of his neck, John stood on the gangplank of the Wraith shuttle and looked up at Todd.

“Ah. So. Thanks for…” He waved vaguely. Coughed. “Um. Everything, I guess.”

He still felt a little shaken up, raw-boned and gangly. Like a half-broke mustang colt, maybe. His skin felt new, tingly like he’d been spruced up all over with a soft toothbrush and he had a slight headache behind his eyes, like all those colors had worked him over. But his mind felt clear as the water in the fountain on Pink Haze.

Todd nodded at him, head tilted, speculative. A smile once again crossed his face.

“You are in my debt,” he said pleasantly. “I will no doubt require another favor from you one day.”

“I don’t know that I’m exactly looking forward to that,” John admitted. 

“Would your welcome be warmer then, John Sheppard, if I should bring some pomo berries?” He arched his eyebrows delicately, his lean, tattooed face a study in diplomatic innocence.

“Oh fuck you,” John said sourly. “They _were_ aphrodisiacs, I fucking knew it!” And John stumped down the gangplank, alive and annoyed and maybe a little turned on. 

Todd’s huffing laughter followed him all the way to the gate.

  
  
  
END  
  
  


John and his gray beard are courtesy of Jflan's insta. Surprise, that hot goofball is a silver fox. Who knew? Any and all horseracing stuff swiped from [this fucking NUTS Narratively article about rigging races](https://narratively.com/historys-greatest-horse-racing-cheat-and-his-incredible-painting-trick/). I mentally cast Karen Allen (Marion from Raiders of the Lost Ark!) as John's mother, if that means anything to you. 

**Author's Note:**

> I guess I technically exceeded even the kind extension the gang at Fandom Trumps Hate gave me, but at least my conscience is clear! My dear, here is that story you donated all that dough for in the ten or twenty years it's been since February last. It was fun getting to hang around with Todd and I hope you and John enjoyed yourselves at least half as much as our Wraith pal did. Thank you for your kindness and your vibrant fan glow!


End file.
